Computer models of polymer mixtures studied at NIST can help develop improved lithography resists for nanomanufacturing.

NIST anticipates funding the new center at approximately $5 million per year for five years, with the possibility of renewing the award for an additional five years. Funding is subject to the availability of funds through NIST’s appropriations. The competition is open to accredited institutions of higher education and nonprofit organizations located in the United States and its territories. The proposing institution may work as part of a consortium that could include other academic institutions; nonprofit organizations; companies; or state, tribal or local governments.

Advanced materials, such as new high-performance alloys or ceramics, polymers, glasses, nanocomposites or biomaterials, are a key factor in global competitiveness. They drive the development of new products and new technical capabilities, and can create whole new industries. However, currently, the average time from laboratory discovery of a new material to its first commercial use can take up to 20 years. Reducing that lag by half is one of the primary goals of the administration’s Materials Genome Initiative, announced in 2011.

In many cases, the lengthy time for materials development is due to a repetitive process of trial and error experimentation that would be familiar to Thomas Edison. The Materials Genome Initiative and the new NIST center focus on dramatically reducing this through the use of measurement and data-based research tools: massive materials databases, computer models and computer simulations. The new center will provide a mechanism to merge NIST expertise and resources in materials science, materials characterization, reference data and standards with leading research capabilities in industry and academia for designing, producing and processing advanced materials.

Full details of the solicitation, including eligibility requirements, selection criteria, legal requirements and the mechanism for submitting proposals are found in an announcement of Federal Funding Opportunity (FFO) posted at Grants.gov under funding opportunity number 2013-NIST-ADV-MAT-COE-01.

Applications will only be accepted through the Grants.gov website. The deadline for applications is 11:59 p.m. Eastern time, Aug. 12, 2013.

NIST will offer a webinar presentation on the Advanced Materials Center of Excellence on July 15, 2013, at 2 p.m. Eastern time. The webinar will offer general guidance on preparing proposals and provide an opportunity to answer questions from the public about the program. Participation in the webinar is not required to apply. There is no cost for the webinar, but participants must register in advance. Information on, and registration for the webinar is available at www.nist.gov/mgi.

Energy produced from renewable sources such as hydro, wind, and solar will exceed that from natural gas and more than double the outupt from nuclear by 2016, according to a recent International Energy Agencyreport, making it the second most important global electricity source, after coal.

According to projections, renewable power will increase by a whopping 40% over the next five years, despite what the report calls a “difficult economic context.” Renewables are currently the fastest-growing electricity source, and will make up almost a quarter of the global power mix by 2018, according to the IEA, up from an estimated 20% in 2011. Non-hydro sources (wind, solar, geothermal, etc.) are expected to double by 2018, reaching 8%, according to the Medium-Term Renewable Energy Market Report (link opens in PDF).

“As their costs continue to fall, renewable power sources are increasingly standing on their own merits versus new fossil-fuel generation,” said Agency Executive DirectorMaria van der Hoeven during a presentation. “This is good news for a global energy system that needs to become cleaner and more diversified, but it should not be an excuse for government complacency, especially among OECD countries.”

(Nanowerk News) By creating a small electrical field that removes salts from seawater, chemists at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Marburg in Germany have introduced a new method for the desalination of seawater that consumes less energy and is dramatically simpler than conventional techniques. The new method requires so little energy that it can run on a store-bought battery.

The process evades the problems confronting current desalination methods by eliminating the need for a membrane and by separating salt from water at a microscale.

The technique, called electrochemically mediated seawater desalination, was described last week in the journal Angewandte Chemie (“Electrochemically Mediated Seawater Desalination”). The research team was led by Richard Crooks of The University of Texas at Austin and Ulrich Tallarek of the University of Marburg. It’s patent-pending and is in commercial development by startup company Okeanos Technologies.

The left panel shows the salt (which is tagged with a fluorescent tracer) flowing upward after a voltage is applied by an electrode (the dark rectangle) jutting into the channel at just the point where it branches. In the right panel no voltage is being applied. (Image: Kyle Knust)

“The availability of water for drinking and crop irrigation is one of the most basic requirements for maintaining and improving human health,” said Crooks, the Robert A. Welch Chair in Chemistry in the College of Natural Sciences. “Seawater desalination is one way to address this need, but most current methods for desalinating water rely on expensive and easily contaminated membranes. The membrane-free method we’ve developed still needs to be refined and scaled up, but if we can succeed at that, then one day it might be possible to provide fresh water on a massive scale using a simple, even portable, system.”

This new method holds particular promise for the water-stressed areas in which about a third of the planet’s inhabitants live. Many of these regions have access to abundant seawater but not to the energy infrastructure or money necessary to desalt water using conventional technology. As a result, millions of deaths per year in these regions are attributed to water-related causes.

“People are dying because of a lack of freshwater,” said Tony Frudakis, founder and CEO of Okeanos Technologies. “And they’ll continue to do so until there is some kind of breakthrough, and that is what we are hoping our technology will represent.”

To achieve desalination, the researchers apply a small voltage (3.0 volts) to a plastic chip filled with seawater. The chip contains a microchannel with two branches. At the junction of the channel an embedded electrode neutralizes some of the chloride ions in seawater to create an “ion depletion zone” that increases the local electric field compared with the rest of the channel. This change in the electric field is sufficient to redirect salts into one branch, allowing desalinated water to pass through the other branch.

“The neutralization reaction occurring at the electrode is key to removing the salts in seawater,” said Kyle Knust, a graduate student in Crooks’ lab and first author on the paper.

Like a troll at the foot of the bridge, the ion depletion zone prevents salt from passing through, resulting in the production of freshwater.

Thus far Crooks and his colleagues have achieved 25 percent desalination. Although drinking water requires 99 percent desalination, they are confident that goal can be achieved.

“This was a proof of principle,” said Knust. “We’ve made comparable performance improvements while developing other applications based on the formation of an ion depletion zone. That suggests that 99 percent desalination is not beyond our reach.”

The other major challenge is to scale up the process. Right now the microchannels, about the size of a human hair, produce about 40 nanoliters of desalted water per minute. To make this technique practical for individual or communal use, a device would have to produce liters of water per day. The authors are confident that this can be achieved as well.

If these engineering challenges are surmounted, they foresee a future in which the technology is deployed at different scales to meet different needs.

“You could build a disaster relief array or a municipal-scale unit,” said Frudakis. “Okeanos has even contemplated building a small system that would look like a Coke machine and would operate in a standalone fashion to produce enough water for a small village.”

(Nanowerk News) Linde Electronics, the global electronics business of The Linde Group, launched a revolutionary new carbon nanotube ink to drive innovation in the development of next generation displays, sensors and other electronic devices. Linde’s carbon nanotube inks can be used to manufacture completely new technologies, such as a smartphone with a screen that rolls up like a window shade and a see-through GPS device embedded in the windshield of a car.

Carbon nanotubes are an allotrope of carbon like graphite and diamond, and they have unique physical and electronic properties. These include a higher thermal conductivity than diamond; greater mechanical strength than steel (orders of magnitude by weight); and a larger electrical conductivity than copper. It is due to these properties that carbon nanotubes will enable electronic device manufacturers develop more innovative electronic devices.

To help device manufacturers and the research and development community to explore the full potential of carbon nanotube based technologies, Linde is making its nanotube inks available to developers. These nanotube inks contain individual carbon nanotubes and are produced without damaging or shortening the nanotubes and therefore preserve the unique nanotube properties.

This landmark development drastically improves the performance of transparent conductive thin films made from the inks and opens the door for the development of nanotube applications in not only consumer electronics, but also the healthcare sector and sensor manufacturing.

“While we’ve seen a lot of excitement around nanotubes in the past ten years, we’ve not yet seen a commercially viable nanotube solution in the market because of challenges in the processing of this great material,” said Dr Sian Fogden, Market and Technology Development Manager for Linde Electronics’ nanomaterials unit. “Our nanotube technology and our unique nanotube inks overcome these challenges, paving the way for completely new types of high-functionality electronic devices.”

Linde, which develops and supplies specialist materials and gases for the world’s leading electronic manufacturers, is in the final development stages with its single wall carbon nanotube technology. Alongside the launch of the nanotube ink into the development community, the company will also provide its nanotube ink at large scale directly to electronic device manufacturers.

About The Linde Group

The Linde Group is a world-leading gases and engineering company with around 62,000 employees in more than 100 countries worldwide. In the 2012 financial year, Linde generated revenue of EUR 15.280 bn. The strategy of the Group is geared towards long-term profitable growth and focuses on the expansion of its international business with forward-looking products and services. Linde acts responsibly towards its shareholders, business partners, employees, society and the environment — in every one of its business areas, regions and locations across the globe. The company is committed to technologies and products that unite the goals of customer value and sustainable development.

Today’s chalcopyrite thin film cells based on copper indium gallium selenide are already reaching efficiencies of more than 20 percent. For the fabrication of the extremely thin polycrystalline layers, the process of coevaporation has lead to the best results so far: During coevaporation, two separate elements are evaporated simultaneously, first indium (or gallium) and selenium, then copper and selenium, and, finally, indium (or gallium) and selenium again. This way, a thin film of crystals forms, which exhibit only a small number of defects. “Until recently, we did not fully understand what exactly happens during this coevaporation process,” says Dr. Roland Mainz of the HZB’s Institute of Technology. The team of physicists worked for three years using on-site and real-time measurements to find an answer to this question.

Polycrystalline film growth during coevaporation in real time using in situ X-ray diffraction and fluorescence analysis. (Figure: R. Mainz/C.Kaufmann/HZB)

Novel experimental chamber constructed

For these measurements they constructed a new kind of experimental chamber, which allows for an analysis of polycrystalline chalcopyrite film formation during coevaporation when exposed to synchrotron light at BESSY II. In addition to the evaporation sources for the elements, this vacuum chamber contains heating and cooling elements to control the evaporative process. According to Mainz, “one of the main challenges was adjusting the chamber, which weighs around 250 kilograms, with an accuracy of 10 micrometer.” Because of thermal expansion during evaporation, the height has to be automatically re-adjusted every few seconds.

Combination of x-ray diffraction and fluorescence analysis

With this setup, for the first time worldwide they were able to observe polycrystalline film growth using in situ X-ray diffraction and fluorescence analysis during coevaporation in real time. “We are now able to see how crystalline phases form and transform and when defects form during the different stages of evaporation. “But we’re also able to tell when these defects disappear again.” This takes place in the second process stage, when copper and selenium are evaporated. Excess copper, which deposits at the surface in the form of copper selenide helps to remove defects. “This was already known before from previous experiments. But now, using fluorescence signals and numeric model calculations, we are able to show how copper selenide penetrates the copper indium selenide layer,” Mainz explains. Here clear-cut differences between copper indium selenide and copper gallium selenide layers became apparent: While copper is able to penetrate the copper-indium-selenide layer, in the case of copper-gallium-selenide, which is otherwise pretty similar, it remains at the surface. This could be one possible reason for why the use of pure copper gallium selenide does not yield high efficiency solar cells.

Concrete steps for optimization

“We now know that for further optimization of the process it is important to concentrate on the transition point into the copper-rich phase. Up to now the process was performed very slowly throughout all stages to give defects enough time to disappear. Our findings suggest that the process can be accelerated at some stages and that it is sufficient to slow it down only at points where defects are efficiently eliminated,” explains Mainz. Mainz is already looking forward to future project EMIL, which is currently being set up at BESSY II. Here even more powerful tools will become available for the study of complex processes during growth of new types of solar cells in situ and in real time.

Top PV award goes to researcher who brought credibility to testing of solar cells and modules

June 19, 2013

An engineer from the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) whose testing and characterization laboratory brings credibility to the measurement of efficiency of solar cells and modules has been awarded the prestigious William R. Cherry Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Keith Emery, a principal scientist at NREL, received the award at the 39th IEEE’s Photovoltaic Specialists Conference in Tampa Bay.

“Accredited measurements from Emery’s laboratories are considered the gold standard by the U.S. and international PV communities,” said NREL colleague Pete Sheldon, Deputy Director of the National Center for Photovoltaics on the NREL campus in Golden, CO. “His leadership in the development of cell and module performance measurement techniques and the development of standards, has set the foundation for the PV community for the last 25 years.”

The award is named in honor of William R. Cherry, a founder of the photovoltaic community. In the 1950s, Cherry was instrumental in establishing solar cells as the ideal power source for space satellites and for recognizing, advocating and nurturing the use of photovoltaic systems for terrestrial applications. The purpose of the award is to recognize an individual engineer or scientist who devoted a part of their professional life to the advancement of the science and technology of photovoltaic energy conversion.

Emery is the third consecutive Cherry Award winner from NREL. In 2011, Jerry Olson, who developed the multi-junction solar cell, won the award. Last year, Sarah Kurtz, who helped Olson develop the multi-junction cell and now is a global leader in solar module reliability, won the award. Three other NREL scientists won the Cherry Award previously – Paul Rappaport (1980), Larry Kazmerski (1993), and Tim Coutts (2005).

Emery says he was floored by the award, considered among the top one or two annual awards globally in the photovoltaic community.

Others aren’t surprised, citing his work to bring iron-clad certainty to the claims made by solar companies about the efficiency of their photovoltaic cells and modules – not to mention the 320 scientific publications he was able to write.

He has spent his career building the capabilities of that testing and characterization lab, making it one of a handful of premier measurement labs in the world – and the only place in the United States that calibrates primary terrestrial standards for solar-cell characterization.

Unbelievable claims of high efficiency would be out in the literature without any independent verification. “We decided that independent verification was critical for credibility,” Emery said.

“We have to thank DOE for this,” Emery said. “They’ve funded it. We’ve been able to offer the service to all terrestrial PV groups in the U.S. from national labs to universities to low-budget startups. They all get the same quality of service.”

The readily available service is so researchers and companies have equal access to the resources needed for independent efficiency measurement, he said. “We provide the same playing field for everyone.”

Emery spent the first 25 years of his life in Lansing, Michigan, attending public schools, then going on to Lansing Community College and Michigan State University where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. From there he went to Colorado State University to fabricate and test ITO on silicon solar cells, and then was hired at NREL. At NREL, in the 1980s, Emery developed the test equipment and put together the data-acquisition system for characterizing and measuring the efficiency of solar cells.

Emery gives much of the credit to the colleagues who work in his lab and who have on average about 16 years at NREL. “Take my team away and I wouldn’t have gotten this award – it’s that simple.”

Sheldon said Emery’s work “brings scientific credibility to the entire photovoltaic field, ensuring global uniformity in cell and module measurements. His getting the award is certainly well deserved.”

NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy’s primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for the Energy Department by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.

Imagine a tiny robot the size of a human cell, injected by the millions into your bloodstream on a search and destroy mission: to locate cancer cells, and kill them. Welcome to the scientific frontier of nanotechnology